Monday, June 23, 2014

Technique with distress inks!

Hey Crafty people!!Hope you are are doing good and creating something pretty and nice !I hope that this months challenge has kept you all on toes and have given a boost to your thinking caps on different ways of using the distress inks!!!I'm here with a nice tutorial on distress ink blending, and I guess that this technique will provide you with much more ideas and thoughts about how to go with the distress inks.Here's a little brief about distress inks first!Tim Holtz Distress Inks are a collection of 48 acid-free, non-toxic, fade resistant, water-based dye inks. They're perfect for the new vintage, stained, aged effect crafters are creating in their altered books, scrapbook pages, cards and paper craft projects.PS: This is a picture heavy post with little tips and tricks I follow(With an added perk of a tutorial too) so sit back, relax and enjoy with a nice cuppa coffee!!! :)Here's what I made with the inks!

Isn't it pretty nice with all and summer'y and peppy colors!!And yes, I almost forgot to tell you guys one thing, Happy Crafter has launched its very first dies in India which have been designed here in India itself !!! Check out the site for the these pretty dies, they have nice shapes and are reasonably priced too!! Did you noticed the big pink flower in the tag?? I made it using the circle scallop die from the store!! Here's a closer version of the flower, I very much loved it!!!

Lets hop below to see how the tag is made !!

The first thing that you need to start with the tag is a tag cut out from a cardstock paper and your distress inks.

I have used the following colors, Mustard Seed, Salty ocean, Peacock feathers and spice marmalade.

Here's a pictorial step by step instructions on how to do the distress ink blending.

A Little tip: The way you hold your distress tool to do the blending is what determines how the color would come out to be. Hold the tool with a steady hand, but not forcefully. Always place your index finger on the handle of the tool and hold the tool with with your thumb and the middle finger :)

I start off with one of the sides of the tag and used Mustard seed ink and inked my tag with a distress ink tool (Ohh between, Imaginations has all the Distress inks and the tools needed, you can check the store and fill up your stock of the distress inks)I then took the Spice marmalade ink and started to blend it with the mustard seed and went on till where I wanted the ink to spread around. I then took the salty ocean ink and started to blend in the same way above the mustard seed ink (did you notice that little patch of green which comes in when the 2 inks blend with each other?? ) they best part if the inks is the generation of a new color with any two inks are blended with each other!

I then completed my distress tag with the peacock feather's ink and spritzed the whole tag with a little water, precisely by taking a little water in my hand and spatting little droplets on my tags. You can see in the above picture that the water has created pretty effect on the tags and has given me a nicer effect. Then I took a white ribbon and dabbed it with the spice marmalade ink and then spritzed it with a little water and allowed the color to react with water and spread out !! (I dried the ribbon for a little while before tying it !!)As in the 6th picture above, before putting up the whole tag together, I check on how I would be placing my embellishments (This step is a little wiser to do since you do not want to pull out everything after fixing things in place incase the final look is not appealing to you) A little tip here: I normally ensemble my embellishments the way I want them to be at different places and click pictures, and then go back see all the pictures to see which one looks the best and then select the best one which I like and which also looks the best. I then assembled the whole tag together and added a little doily behind the stamped image, and ta daaaa... my tag is complete!!!Here's a closer look at the stamped image, I have used Mustard seed to ink the image and then have used spiced marmalade around the edges to darker the edges.

I hope you all enjoyed the tag making process and tempted enough to try this technique to make some nice pretty creations!I could not resist making another tag and here it is

This is not based on ink blending, but I have coloured the entire tag with peacock feather ink and then took the kaisercraft stamp and stamped it using the same ink. Doesn't it gives a nice pattern paper ? I like using my stamps for making pattern paper for myself too sometimes(Especially when I need a different looking paper).The Prima doll is coloured with distress inks too!!! Doesn't that makes the distress inks very much versatile?? Here are the two tags placed together

I love both of them ( couldn't select a better than the other one), which one do you like??? (Please say both :) )I do hope you enjoyed the tutorial. I had awesome fun making these tags and shall I tell you the secret?? This has been my second attempt at making the tags, and I loved them.Do leave some love and do not forget to try this pretty technique out yourself, it's fun and a really cool one too.Incase you have some query, do leave a comment and I would be happy to help !!!!Also do not forget to enter into this months challenge at imaginations.. Here's a link to the same #1 Distress inksHappy crafting!Hugs and lots of love!Manu